NOVELIST FOLLOWS HER DREAM

Iranian immigrant Zohreh Ghahremani used to be a dentist. Now, as a writer, she does a different kind of drilling, into the heart of what it means to be a daughter, wife and mother.

Her first book, “Sky of Red Poppies,” was a One Book San Diego selection in 2012, a rare honor for a debut novelist. Her latest, “The Moon Daughter,” opens a window on Iranian culture, its treatment of women, and the hard choices they face in trying to make lives for themselves.

The La Jolla resident, who jokingly describes her age as “30-something, and the something is secret” (she’s in her 60s), will be at the San Carlos public library at 1 p.m. on Sept. 13.

Q: You have an interesting history. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

A: All my life. I have always been a writer, but I was encouraged by my family to pursue a different direction in my education, and I did, being the obedient daughter that I was, and I became a dentist and a very successful one. But I never stopped writing, and then one day I heard on the radio if there’s something you’ve always wanted to do, do it.

Q: Who did you hear say that?

A: It was on NPR. I was living in Chicago, on my way to my practice, and I heard it. I pulled into the parking lot and went down and asked my secretary to run an ad, “Practice for sale.” And I made a U-turn in life, and it is the best thing I have ever done.

Q: How long ago was that?

A: That was the year 1998, and it took my husband and me a couple of years to relocate from Chicago to San Diego. He’s still teaching at UCSD (he’s a radiologist at the medical school) and I became a full-time writer.

Q: What themes were you interested in exploring for “The Moon Daughter”?

A: I wanted to bring about a subject that we rarely talk about, and that is the women’s situation around the world, in particular Muslim countries where men are still allowed to have up to four wives and having a little fling seems to be the fashion. How do women deal with that? How does a woman share her man?

Also, my bicultural profile will always be reflected in my writing. So I wrote the book in two sections. Part Two deals with issues of second-generation young people, those like my own children, who come here and are brought up as Americans and yet they have to deal with their parents’ otherness, if you will.

Q: When you write books, are you in some way telling stories for your children?

A: In the first one I was. I wanted my pen to be a camera and take them back to a life they’ve never seen. In the second one, no. I’m a writer and just writing what I want to write. If they like it, that’s their choice. If there’s a message in it, it’s just to tell them that I understand how difficult it is for them to understand me.

Q: In the new book, the story is set in motion by the birth of a child, who isn’t the son her father is wishing for and who also has a deformed leg. What was it about both factors that made you want to write about them?

A: I wanted to mention the fact that still, in so many societies, to be born a boy is an advantage. It is something that is first of all out of our control, and if it is in control, it is the father who is the factor, OK? And yet it is the woman who faces the humiliation of having failed to deliver a son. Even to this day, in many, many societies, they think it’s the woman.

I gave her a minor defect first of all to keep the story going, but also to bring out the fact that again there are societies that have a difficult time dealing with and accepting disabilities. They hide it, try to mask it — it is seen as a problem to be ashamed of rather than a problem that needs to be solved. There is throughout the book this question: What do we do when life deals us a bad hand?